Friday, 17 January 2014

For this project my three words were; trapeze artist, grappling hook and museum. It was quite easy to fall into the generic trap of thinking of an acrobatic thief stealing from a museum and obviously didn't want to do something quite typical like that.

The idea I propose for my project is a museum dedicated to circuses, and one of the displays it has an old yellowing newspaper clipping and rusting grappling hook with it. The story within the newspaper clipping describes a horrific accident at a popular troupe's performance, and all that's left of them is this report, name completely tarnished because of the accident. What that is, well I'm not entirely sure just yet. Maybe the star performer, a trapeze artist had introduced a grappling hook into his routine and it went completely wrong? Maybe his screw up cause fatalities in the audience?I'm currently putting together some storyboard ideas for this and a couple of pose studies as I'd find them quite beneficial for this project, regardless of what idea I end up going with in the end. I've also been throwing influence maps together too as I've been looking at designs quite a lot this past week and those will be posted up shortly.

Wednesday, 15 January 2014

In this session we learnt about the three fundamental shapes in character design; the square, circle and triangle, and adapted this with our attempts at redesigning characters with these attributes. I was given Bugs Bunny and attempted to make him more villainous:

Next we were given a type of character we had to make 3 designs for, and I was given "gladiator". Here I went for a more traditional gladiator design for the three of them, and attempted to follow the fundamental shapes for character designing:

Thursday, 9 January 2014

For the soundscape project my keyframe is one of William Heath Robinson's illustrations. He was well known for his quirky invention drawings, and I couldn't help feeling engrossed by it.

"Testing Artificial Teeth in a Modern Tooth Works" (1928) by William Heath Robinson

First of all, I had no idea what the contraption was for, and it actually took awhile to find out the title of this piece. The contraption has an artificial tooth at the end and is dropped with a weighted force onto the cooked chicken to test its durability. Still, quite a bizarre test and invention.

However, the first thing that caught my eye wasn't the invention but actually the backdrop. The silhouettes of factories producing ridiculous amounts of smoke. To be honest I was incredibly happy to see this as my first thoughts went straight to the industrial revolution, a period I loved studying, and ideas for the animatic came to straight away.

I went straight to YouTube to watch the London 2012 Olympics "Pandemonium" for inspiration for this, which is also a personal favourite of mine. The visuals and soundtrack were so striking, the controlled chaos caused goosebumps for me.

I thought I would share the video of it here, its absolutely fantastic.

I have a few ideas that I've been sketching out over the past few days and will post them up shortly.